Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
I
Rendering
Real-time rendering is not only an integral part of this topic series, it is also
an exciting field where one can observe rapid evolution and advances to meet
the ever-rising demands of game developers and game players. In this section we
introduce new techniques that will be interesting and beneficial to both hobbyists
and experts alike—and this time these techniques do not only include classical
rendering topics, but also cover the use of rendering pipelines for fast physical
simulations.
The first chapter in the rendering section is “Per-Pixel Lists for Single Pass A-
Buffer,” by Sylvain Lefebvre, Samuel Hornus and Anass Lasram. Identifying all
the surfaces projecting into a pixel has many important applications in computer
graphics, such as computing transparency. They often also require ordering of the
fragments in each pixel. This chapter discusses a very fast and ecient approach
for recording and simultaneously sorting of all fragments that fall within a pixel
in a single geometry pass.
Our next chapter is “Reducing Texture Memory Usage by 2-Channel Color
Encoding,” by Krzysztof Kluczek. This chapter discusses a technique for com-
pactly encoding and eciently decoding color images using only 2-channel tex-
tures. The chapter details the estimation of the respective 2D color space and
provides example shaders ready for use.
“Particle-Based Simulation of Material Aging,” by Tobias Gunther, Kai Roh-
mer, and Thorsten Grosch describes a GPU-based, interactive simulation of ma-
terial aging processes. Their approach enables artists to interactively control the
aging process and outputs textures encoding surface properties such as precipi-
tate, normals and height directly usable during content creation.
Our fourth chapter, “Simple Rasterization-Based Liquids,” is by Martin Guay.
He describes a powerful yet simple way of simulating particle-based liquids on the
GPU. These simulations typically involve sorting the particles into spatial accel-
eration structures to resolve inter-particle interactions. In this chapter, Martin
details how this costly step can be sidestepped with splatting particles onto tex-
tures, i.e., making use of the rasterization pipeline, instead of sorting them.
—Carsten Dachsbacher
